Vixen 03 Part 79

"A waste of words," Zeegler said contemptuously. "Thomas Machita only speaks with violence."

"Like all Westerners, Mr. Pitt, you are naive to our battle," Machita said, his face stoic. "Talk cannot change what is meant to be. The racist South African government will fall to blacks in time."

"You will pay dearly before your flag flies over Cape Town," said Zeegler.

"Fool's mate," said Pitt. "You're both playing a fool's-mate gambit."

Zeegler looked at him. "Perhaps in your eyes, Mr. Pitt. But to us it goes to a depth no outsider can fathom."

The colonel continued to his car and Machita faded into the jungle.

The truce was over. The chasm was too wide to be crossed.

A wave of impotency mixed with anger swept Pitt. "What will it all matter a thousand years from now?" he shouted after them.

He picked up the shovel and in a slow tempo began scooping dirt into the grave. He could not bring himself to look at De Vaal. Soon he heard the splatter of dirt on dirt and he knew no one would ever see the Defence Minister again.

When he was finished and the mound was neatly shaped, he opened a box that lay on the gra.s.s beside the headstone and removed four flowering plants. These he carefully embedded in the soil at the corners of the Fawkes burial plot. Then he straightened and stepped back.

"Rest well, Captain Fawkes. May you not be judged too harshly."

Feeling neither remorse nor sadness but rather a kind of contentment, Pitt placed the empty box under one arm and the shovel over his shoulder and set a course for the village of Umkono.

Behind him, the four bougainvillea plants arched their blossoms toward the African sun.

Omega

South Pacific-January 1989

Rongelo Island-actually a tiny atoll, an island in name only-was a solitary fragment of land floating in isolation on 160,000 square miles of Pacific. Its ma.s.s rose only six feet above the glitter of the ocean, so low it was impossible to see from ten miles away. Driven by wind and tide, the waves burst on the fragile reef surrounding the narrow strand of bone-white beach, and then closed ranks on the other side, marching on for hundreds of miles before making the next landfall.

The island was barren except for a few rotting coconut palms that had been battered to stumps by typhoon waves. In the middle of its highest point the skeletons of Dr. Vetterly and his a.s.sistants, turned bleached and porous over the years, lay on the jagged coral, the empty eye sockets of their skulls turned skyward, as though waiting for deliverance.

At sunset the thunderclouds behind Rongelo caught the diminishing rays of light and glowed a flaring gold as the missile dropped silently from s.p.a.ce, the thunder of its pa.s.sage through the atmosphere left far behind.

Suddenly a blue-white blaze lighted the sea for hundreds of miles, and a great fireball swallowed the atoll. In less than a second the fiery ma.s.s erupted and swelled like a monstrous spastic bubble. The blinding colors

on its surface melted from orange to pink and finally to deep purple. The shock wave lashed across the water like a lightning bolt, flattening the rolling swells.

Then the fireball released its hold on the surface and boiled toward the sky, digesting millions of tons of coral before spitting it out in a swirling geyser of steam and rubble. The ma.s.s inflated to a diameter of five miles, and in less than a minute the inferno reached an alt.i.tude of 115,000 feet. There it hung, gradually cooling into an immense dark cloud that slowly drifted to the north.

Rongelo Island had disappeared. All that remained was a depression three hundred feet deep and two miles across. Quickly the sea rushed in and covered any trace of the gaping wound. The sun was tinted an eerie yellow-green as it stole below the horizon.

The Quick Death organism had ceased to be.